Drop on demand inkjet technology for producing printed media has been employed in commercial products such as printers, plotters, and facsimile machines. Generally, an inkjet image is formed by selectively ejecting ink drops from a plurality of drop generators or inkjets, which are arranged in a printhead or a printhead assembly, onto an image substrate. For example, the printhead assembly and the image substrate are moved relative to one other and the inkjets are operated to eject ink drops onto the image substrate at appropriate times. The timing of the inkjet activation is performed by a printhead controller, which generates firing signals that activate the inkjets to eject ink. The image substrate may be an intermediate image member, such as a print drum or belt, from which the ink image is later transferred to a print medium, such as paper. The image substrate may also be a moving web of print medium or a series of print medium sheets onto which the ink drops are directly ejected. The ink ejected from the inkjets may be liquid ink, such as aqueous, solvent, oil based, UV curable ink or the like, which is stored in containers installed in the printer. Alternatively, the ink may be loaded in a solid form that is delivered to a melting device, which heats the solid ink to its melting temperature to generate liquid ink that is supplied to a print head.
During the operational life of these imaging devices, inkjets in one or more printheads may become unable to eject ink in response to a firing signal. The defective condition of the inkjet may be temporary and the inkjet may return to operational status after one or more image printing cycles. In other cases, the inkjet may not be able to eject ink until a purge cycle is performed. A purge cycle may successfully unclog inkjets so they are able to eject ink once again. Execution of a purge cycle, however, requires the imaging device to be taken out of its image generating mode. Thus, purge cycles affect the throughput rate of an imaging device and are preferably performed during periods in which the imaging device is not generating images.
Methods have been developed that enable an imaging device to generate images even though one or more inkjets in the imaging device are unable to eject ink. These methods cooperate with image rendering methods to control the generation of firing signals for inkjets in a printhead. Rendering refers to the processes that receive input image data values and then generate output image values. The output image values are used to generate firing signals for a printhead to cause the inkjets to eject ink onto the recording media. Once the output image values are generated, a method may use information regarding defective inkjets detected in a printhead to identify the output image values that correspond to a defective inkjet in a printhead. The method then searches to find a neighboring or nearby output image value that can be adjusted to compensate for the defective inkjet. Preferably, an increase in the amount of ink ejected near the defective inkjet may be achieved by replacing a zero or nearly zero output image value with the output image value that corresponds to the defective inkjet. Another method increases neighboring or nearby output image values to boost the amount of ink to be ejected by a plurality of inkjets in the vicinity of the defective inkjet. Another method is able to compensate for the defective inkjet because a normalization process may be used to establish a maximum output image value for inkjets that is less than the output value that causes an inkjet to eject the maximum amount of ink that can be ejected by an inkjet. Thus, an output image value can be increased beyond the normalized maximum output image value to enable an inkjet to eject an amount of ink corresponding to the maximum output value plus some incremental amount. By firing several nearby inkjets in this manner, the ejected ink density can approximate the ink mass that would have been ejected had the defective inkjet been able to eject the ink for a missing pixel.
The previously known methods for re-distributing the ink to be ejected by a defective inkjet to other neighboring or nearby inkjets are useful as long as the nearby inkjets and the defective inkjet are printing a generally uniform area at an ink mass that is less than the maximum ink mass that can be ejected by an inkjet. In order to preserve the ability to increase the amount of ink ejected by an inkjet in the vicinity of a missing, intermittent, or weak inkjet, some printers reduce solid uniform areas in an ink image to a predetermined maximum. That is, the ink drops for the image area are limited to an ink mass, such as 80% of full ink drop mass, to enable image data for inkjets in the vicinity of a missing, intermittent, or weak inkjet to be increased to a value that results in a firing signal that causes the inkjet to eject an ink drop that is 100% of the maximum ink drop size. Maintaining the ink drop size in an image area below the maximum ink drop mass is called “dithering.” One issue that may arise when dithering is used is edge raggedness. The human eye is more sensitive to image defects at locations where contrast is significant, such as edges. Holes in an image at edges of objects, such as text, may significantly increase fuzziness that may arise when dithering is used for the object. Thus, preserving the ability to compensate for missing, intermittent, or weak inkjets without increasing raggedness at object edges is important in image processing.